


Seven Deadly Sins (And a Virtue)

by Cinaed



Category: CSI: Las Vegas
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, F/F, F/M, Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-13
Updated: 2010-03-13
Packaged: 2017-10-07 23:09:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinaed/pseuds/Cinaed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendy has committed every sin you can imagine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Deadly Sins (And a Virtue)

i. Sloth

  
"You need to get up, Wendy," her mother says from the doorway, and Wendy lies very still. Maybe then her mother will think she’s asleep and go away. 

After a moment, her mother sighs and walks over to the bed, resting a gentle hand on Wendy’s shoulder; Wendy cannot quite hide the flinch because her mother’s hand has inadvertently landed on a three-day-old bruise. "Wendy, you need to go out and get some fresh air. Your father and Michael are playing baseball. Why don’t you join them?" 

She grudgingly opens her eyes, and mutters, "Don’t feel well." When her mother just shoots her a look of disbelief, she closes her eyes and ignores her. 

"_Fine_," her mother snaps after a moment, and Wendy knows without opening her eyes that her mother is glowering. "Spend the rest of your _life_ in bed. See if I care." 

Wendy winces at the noise the slammed door makes (it rattles her bones and makes her feel vaguely nauseous), and then tugs the blanket tighter around her. She hadn’t been lying; she doesn’t feel well -- there is an all-encompassing weariness that weighs down on her, has been weighing down on her for what seems like eternity now. The weight increases with each attempt by her mother to drag her out into the sunshine, and she suspects that if her family didn’t interfere, she could sleep more hours than their cat, Sandy, who sleeps eighteen hours a day. 

She presses her face against the pillow and sighs, her shoulder throbbing vaguely in the back of her mind, and lets another summer’s day go by. 

_Thou seest how sloth wastes the sluggish body, as water is corrupted unless it moves._   
~ Ovid

ii. Wrath

  
When Wendy keys her father’s truck, her hands are trembling so violently that she can barely spell out the words ‘home-wrecker’ and ‘asshole’ and she suspects that she misspelled ‘adulterer.’ She’s not thinking clearly at all, because otherwise she would have thought ahead and made it impersonal, with ‘asshole’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘faggot’ -- things that any jerk off the street would have scratched into his beat-up truck, things that her father wouldn’t automatically know was her. 

When her father gets home, one glance at the hard, set look on his face reveals she’s in trouble and the furious gleam in his dark eyes signals danger, but Wendy is still riding the wave of pure fury and doesn’t back down this time. She matches his profanities with obscenities of her own and later matches him blow for blow (though his meaty hands do more damage than hers do). 

Afterwards, when the anger is seeping away to be replaced by something akin to weariness, she wipes at her bloody nose and contemplates if she should tell her mother about the other woman and wonders if her father hits his girlfriend too. 

_Come not within the measure of my wrath._   
~ William Shakespeare 

iii. Vanity

  
She knows that she’s earned this. Wendy is long-since due for this moment of glory through her various talents and undeniable intelligence. She cannot help but pity the rest of her classmates, who are dull and unimaginative and doomed to live worthless lives in this backwater town. 

Soon, she will be off to college on a full scholarship, while these numbskulls wave their high school diplomas proudly and settle into pointless jobs like their fathers and mothers. They will get married, have children, get divorced (probably), die (definitely), and do nothing to help the human race, whereas Wendy will see the lights of San Francisco and make a _difference_. She has always been the big fish in this little, claustrophobia-inducing pond, and now she will finally cast off her shackles and show these cretins that she, Wendy Simms, is a doer, not a dreamer. 

Wendy fights back the rush of sudden rage that wells up at the memories of mocking jibes and sneering looks, of smart remarks about her obsession with academia and rolled eyes whenever she raised her hand to answer a question. 

"And now, a speech from our valedictorian," the principal announces, and the anger is gone, replaced by pure satisfaction; Wendy’s smile is real and large on her face as loud applause reaches her ears and she starts up the stairs of the platform, because she’s _earned_ this moment of glory. 

_Pride sullies the noblest character._  
~ Claudianus

iv. Greed

  
Wendy gets a bitter taste in her mouth whenever some charity organization asks her to spare some change for whatever they are supporting -- helping the homeless, so on, so forth. After all, it is _her_ hard-earned money, so why the hell should she give it up? 

This time is no exception, and she almost glares at the brunette who is wearing a plastic smile that doesn’t reach her hungry eyes, and she has to swallow hard against the sour taste on her tongue. 

"Help the abused women shelter," the woman repeats, and thrusts a coffee can half-filled with dollar bills and change at her. "It’s a good cause." 

Wendy just looks at the woman, and feels something like loathing and embittered pride well up in her chest. _She_ hadn’t had an abused women shelter back home. There had been no coffee cans filled with money to help her and her mother and her brother weather days filled with apprehension and bruises, and _she_ had gotten through her childhood for the most part unscathed. Why did these particular women get aid, while Wendy had been left to fend for herself? It wasn’t fair. These women didn’t deserve her money, not a single cent of it. 

"I’m sure it is," she says bitterly, and grudgingly hands over her spare change because the woman is still gazing at her with those hungry eyes and a few other people are starting to stare as well. 

_We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy._   
~ Anonymous 

v. Lust

  
He pushes her against the door of the bathroom stall door, panting unintelligible words into her mouth as he takes her hard and fast. It seems like only a moment later that Wendy gasps and clenches her fists at the rush of pure pleasure. Then it is over, and he steps away and grabs a towel to wipe himself off with while she adjusts her skirt and smoothes her now-wrinkled halter-top. 

Leaning against the stall and flicking a damp strand away from her face, Wendy watches him step out of the bathroom and disappear into the crowd milling around the bar. Gradually, her breathing steadies, and the rush of pleasure fades, replaced by an unsatisfied feeling in the pit of her stomach, one that is never fulfilled, no matter how many faceless men she sleeps with. 

She sighs, checks her hair in the mirror, redoes her makeup, and then ambles back out to join the crowd. 

A half-hour later a man with red hair and a slightly bored expression catches her eye. He is tall, vaguely handsome, with the faintest hint of a five o’clock shadow. She saunters over, smiling at him from beneath lowered eyelashes, and his apathetic expression shifts to one of interest.

Soon after that, she is back in the bathroom, arching her hips in encouragement as his hands slide up her thighs, and she closes her eyes and welcomes the initial stirrings of quicksilver pleasure. 

_Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes._   
~ Marquis de Sade

vi. Gluttony

  
The cashier looks long and hard at her, in her somber black dress and simple pearls, and then looks even longer at the pile of junk food she is waiting for him to bag, and then just shakes his head and announces, "That’ll be $56.48, ma’am." 

Wendy swipes her credit card through the machine and ignores the curious look the cashier is still directing towards her as she gathers her bags of junk food and heads towards her car. 

She gets home and sets the candy out neatly, ordering them into piles based on her favorites and her least favorites, what company they were from, whether or not they had nuts. In the end, she is left with several piles of candy on her dining room table. 

She sits back and just looks at the candy for a moment, the sweet scent of chocolate filling the room. There had been many rules in the Simms household, and somewhere below ‘always remember to call Father sir’ and somewhere above ‘don’t touch the remote control’ had been the rule of ‘no sweets in the house whatsoever.’ 

Wendy just gazes at the piles of candy for another moment, and then allows herself a grim little smile and grabs a Hershey bar, glancing down at the floor beneath her feet and muttering a dark, "Can’t stop me now, Daddy," before taking a defiant bite of the chocolate. 

_Gluttony is not a secret vice._  
~ Orson Welles 

vii. Envy

  
It is her first day at the Clark County Crime Lab, and Wendy has already made a fool of herself, trying in vain to impress the most influential woman on the nightshift and managing to ramble on like an idiot. 

She watches Catherine Willows walk away, and resents her confident stride, because just watching that self-assured gait makes Wendy feels clumsy and awkward. And then there’s her long, flowing blond hair, because Wendy has always hated having the same coloring as her father and would have given up her first-born child to have hair like spun gold. 

Even after only a few minutes of interacting with the CSI, Wendy knows that Catherine Willows is everything she isn’t, and if Wendy were petty, she would hate the other woman for it. Instead, she sits in her DNA lab and glares at herself in the mirror that she keeps in her purse, longing to replace her ordinary brown eyes with those intense blue ones. 

Later, she will wish she had the ability to pull off that subtle smirk and that elegant raising of an eyebrow that says a thousand words without saying anything at all. For now though, she just sits and frowns at her own reflection and begrudges Catherine Willows for her grace, beauty, and poise. 

_Our envy of others devours us most of all._   
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

i. Hope

  
"Fucking Las Vegas," she growls, frustration knotting her stomach, and flops down at the nearest table in the diner. Wendy has been here three weeks, and yet she’s _still_getting lost on her way to and from work. 

She orders herself pancakes and a cup of coffee, and it’s only once the waitress hands her the steaming cup that Wendy really looks at her. Her first thought is how green the woman’s eyes are. 

"Thanks," she says, feeling a smile creep onto her lips, and lifts the cup to her mouth. She cannot help but watch the other woman as the waitress moves from table to table. 

She guesses the waitress to be around her age, maybe a year younger, maybe a year older. There is a constant half-smirk on the woman’s round face, and Wendy notices how slow and casual she speaks, like she’s got all the time in the world. Just listening to that even, unhurried voice makes Wendy feel calmer somehow, and the smile that crept onto her lips seems content to linger there. 

The waitress starts to meander past her table, and then pauses, and looks at her with languid green eyes that are paradoxically sleepy and yet alert all at the same time. "Your order’ll be ready in just another minute or two." 

"Thanks…." Wendy pauses and looks at the woman’s nametag. "…Julia." 

The half-smirk widens to a smile at that. "It’s Julie. They got my name wrong and never bothered fixing it." She laughs, and the sound is low and rich. "Good thing this is just a temporary job to pay the bills, you know?" 

"Yeah?" Wendy says, and Julie nods. 

"Working my way through my Ph.D. Psychology." 

"I’m a DNA technician for the crime lab," Wendy says, and Julie tilts her head and she finds herself offering up her name and explaining what her job entails and how she moved here only a few weeks ago and the fact that she keeps getting lost. She finds herself adopting Julie’s slow, easy style of talking, and leaning into Julie’s space ever so slightly. The other woman smells of citrus and apples. 

Julie’s originally from North Dakota, and tells Wendy about how she’d gotten heatstroke during her first week in Las Vegas and had actually been taken to the hospital. She talks about her kid brother, who’s got schizophrenia, one of the main reasons she first got into Psychology, and how she wants to work with substance abuse rehabilitation clinics once she’s gotten her Ph.D. 

It’s not until the man behind the counter yells "Hey, Julie, you’ve already had your break!" that they realize how long they’ve been chatting and Wendy notices her coffee has gotten ice-cold. 

They both laugh, embarrassment coloring the sound, and then Julie leans into Wendy’s space and says in a conspiratorial tone that makes something unfamiliar flutter in Wendy’s chest, "Listen, I’m off in thirty minutes. How about I…show you some of the sights?" 

"Sure," Wendy says, and Julie looks almost pleased before she heads over to a nearby neglected table. 

Wendy just watches her, studying the way her golden curls catch the light and her ironic little smile and the way those languid green eyes flicker towards her every so often, as though to reassure herself that Wendy is still sitting there. 

She settles back in her chair, and taps a finger against her mug of ice-cold coffee, the smile still lingering on her lips. The fluttery sensation in her chest hasn’t left, and she can’t help but think that maybe Las Vegas won’t be so bad after all. 

_Hope is only the love of life._   
~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

 


End file.
